Better together: Swarming, information and strange interactions.

When

Start: 10/19/2016 - 4:15pm End : 10/19/2016 - 5:15pm

Category

Colloquium

Speaker

Lou Rossi (UDel)

Abstract

Animal groups often exhibit social behaviors that lead to aggregations. Popular examples include schools of fish, flocks of birds and cohorts of pedestrians. These aggregations serve a variety of functions including navigational guidance, protection, foraging and so forth. These behaviors provide inspiration for the control of autonomous robots and other entities. The advantage to this approach to control is that it is decentralized and trivially scales to large numbers of individuals. Mathematical theory and analysis plays a crucial role in understanding how local interactions map to the motion and dynamics of the entire swarm. One popular proposed signaling mechanism for swarming individuals uses three zones. In three-zone swarming, individual behavior is driven by the position and orientation of neighboring individuals in each of three concentric zones, corresponding to repulsion, orientation and attraction respectively. We will review some results on stability, information transfer and leadership with three zone swarming using a continuum model. Finally, we will explore very different swarming interactions arising in certain plankton species which can signal one another using toxins or by shading one another.